I'm replacing my desktop's hard drive (I've been warned that it's on its way out), but rather than ghosting the current one I've decided to install the OS from fresh.

Previously I was using Linux Mint, but thought this might be a good opportunity to try out some other distros. Given that I mainly use the PC for the web and writing (nothing particularly taxing -- some games, but nothing fancy), I thought I'd ask for a couple of recommendation from you guys as to which ones to try.

Until a certain period I hd recommended to install Ubuntu as it has one of the better destop user interfaces with ad lot of advantages. But starting from the version 12 and now with the 14.04 the distro UI has drastically changed, IMO loosing some of the most interesting features of the linux graphic environment and introducing some other that are not the best solutions at all. I suggest anyway to take a try (at least the live version, before deciding for installation) just because this is my personal opinion. At the actual date, mixing the advantages of the Linux features, a good and reliable User Interface (with lot of possibilities and customisations I definitely suggest to install the last version of Debian desktop. This includes also the advantage to be very near to the raspbian Linux behaviour for the Raspberry PI that is a porting from the same mentioned Debian.

That's a good approach I think. But the usability of the distro involves also resources consumption that consequently impact with the hardware limits , especially when a computer is reborn thanks to Linux. In my opinion, the Ubuntu 14.04 is a good design for real desktop users but is a bit hard to adapt for used users to the more traditional Linux desktop interface like Debian. I use Ubuntu together with Devian (depends on the kind of applications I should use, testing for clients aplications etc.) and to be honest I have not found any slowdown in the new Ubuntu UI so probably your choice is the best for you.

What a coincidence : ) I have an ancient laptop (with XP!) which is incapable of the recent Microsoft OSs, so I'm going with Ubuntu today, I'd ordered an IDE-to-SSD converter. I also like RHEL variants, especially because it is supported for a very long time, but probably better as a server. There is Fedora desktop which I've not used, but am tempted to install.

I have just a 30GB SSD, so I won't be using much software on it either.

Yep, I do like raw Ubuntu, and I've used that quite a lot in the past. As with you guys, I turn to Linux once hardware is too old to cope with Windows any more, and Ubuntu seems like it's always very capable in that capacity.

I mostly use various Ubuntu releases. I prefer 12.04 LTS over 14.04 LTS. I like Debian on RasPi2, but I use Ubuntu on my main machines because I want my XXICC software to run on a commonly-used GNU/Linux so I can observe problems before users.

For desktops I have toyed with mint, ubuntu, debian, suse and others but tend to prefer lubuntu as it works well with limited resources. I don't need lots of bells and whistles on the gui and there's lots of ubuntu packages available.

I'm replacing my desktop's hard drive (I've been warned that it's on its way out), but rather than ghosting the current one I've decided to install the OS from fresh.

Previously I was using Linux Mint, but thought this might be a good opportunity to try out some other distros. Given that I mainly use the PC for the web and writing (nothing particularly taxing -- some games, but nothing fancy), I thought I'd ask for a couple of recommendation from you guys as to which ones to try.